Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

"Have you no communication with Comrade Lugovoy?"

staff departed lower Manhattan Island on the Staten Island ferry late Frinay night. They never stepped ashore at the landing. We lost all contact."

"I want to know where they are," Antonov said evenly. "I want to know the exact location of the experiment.

"I have our best agents working on it."

"We can't allow her to keep us wandering in the dark, especially when there is one billion American dollars' worth of our gold reserves at stake."

Polevoi gave the Communist Party Chairman a crafty look. "Do you intend to pay her fee?"

"Does the Volga melt in January?" Antonov replied with a broad grin.

"She won't be an easy prey to outfox."

The sound of feet tramping through the underbrush could be heard.

Antonov's eyes flickered to the groundkeepers who were approaching with the downed pheasants and then back to Polevoi.

"Just find Lugovoy," he said softly, "and the rest will take care of itself."

Four miles away in a sound truck two men sat in front of a sophisticated microwave receiving set. Beside them two reel-to-reel tape decks were recording Antonov and Polevoi's conversation in the woods.

The men were electronic surveillance specialists with the SDECE, France's intelligence service. Both could interpret six languages, including Russian. In unison they lifted their earphones and exchanged curious looks.

"What in hell do you suppose that was all about?" said one.

The second man gave a Gallic shrug. "Who can say? Probably some kind of Russian double-talk."

"I wonder if an analyst can make anything important out of it?"

"Important or not, we'll never know."

The first man paused, held an earphone to his ear for a few moments and then set it down again. "They're talking with President L'Estrange now. That's all we're going to get."

"Okay, let's close down shop and get the recordings to Paris.

I've got a date at six o'clock."

THE SUN WAS TWO HOURS ABOVE the eastern edge of the city when Sandecker drove through a back gate of Washington's National Airport.

He stopped the car beside a seemingly deserted hangar standing in a weed-covered part of the field far beyond the airlines' maintenance area. He walked to a side door whose weathered wood had long since shed its paint and pressed a small button opposite a large rusting padlock. After a few seconds the door silently swung open.

The cavernous interior was painted a glossy white, which brightly reflected the sun's rays through huge skylights in the curved roof, and had the look of a transportation museum. The polished concrete floor held four long orderly rows of antique and classic automobiles. Most gleamed as elegantly as the day their coachmakers anded the finishing touch. A few were in various stages of restoration. Sandecker lingered by a majestic 1921 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost with coachwork by Park-Ward and a massive red 1925 Isotta-Fraschini with a torpedo body by Sala.

The two centerpieces were an old Ford trimotor aircraft known to aviation enthusiasts as the "tin goose" and an early-twentiethcentury railroad Pullman car with the words MANHATTAN LIMITED painted in gilded letters on its steel side.

Sandecker made his way up a circular iron stairway to a glassenclosed apartment that spanned the upper level across one end of the hangar. The living room was decorated in marine antiques.

One wall was lined with shelves supporting delicately crafted ship models in glass cases.

He found Pitt standing in front of a stove studying a strangelooking mixture in a frying pan. Pitt wore a pair of khaki hiking shorts, tattered tennis shoes and a T-shirt with the words RAISE The LUSITANIA across the front.

"You're just in time to eat, Admiral."

What have you got there?" asked Sandecker, eyeing the mixture with suspicion.

"Nothing fancy. A spicy Mexican omelet."